Assignment 1: Data Analysis to Initiate Improvement Cycles in Your School or District Read the mission statement of your school and think about what barriers, if any, school staff at your school face in accomplishing the school’s mission. Identify a challenge facing your school, based on your own observations or conversations you have had with fellow teachers. Are specific student subgroups falling behind their peers in terms of academic achievement, leading to an achievement gap in your school? Do particular grade levels have higher rates of chronic absenteeism? Do teachers have the necessary supports to be effective in the classroom? In this assignment, you will retrieve and analyze data that inform an educational challenge in your local context. You will then reflect on the use of data in your school and describe how the data you gathered can be used to initiate conversations and improvement cycles in your school. Sources of data may include the Texas Academic Performance Report for your campus (available here: https://rptsvr1.tea.texas.gov/perfreport/tapr/2017/index.html), the Texas School Accountability Dashboard (available here: https://www.texasschoolaccountabilitydashboard.org), the School Report Card (available here: https://tea.texas.gov/perfreport/src/index.html), or any other publicly available or verifiable data source. More information about Texas Education Agency data is available here: https://tea.texas.gov/perfreport/. You will create three tables in APA format that display data that inform educational practices in your local context. In deciding what to include in your tables, consider the following questions: How do student outcomes in your school differ from those at other schools in your district or across the state? On what student outcome measures is your school performing best? What student outcomes is your school struggling with? How do outcomes vary across student groups in your school? If there are gaps in student outcomes between student groups, how large are they and how do those gaps compare to gaps in other schools in your district or across the state? How do average class sizes and average teacher experience in your school differ from other schools in your district or across the state? Based on educational research with which you are familiar, what underlying factors may contribute to differences staff characteristics or student outcomes? Begin your assignment with a brief paragraph describing the educational challenge you have identified. In the same paragraph, describe how school staff have drawn on data in the past to better understand this challenge. Then, for each table, write one paragraph that describes the specific contents of the table (e.g., “Column 1 shows 4-year graduation rates at El Paso High School. Row 1 shows the overall rate and rows 2-6 show rates by student race/ethnicity, for school year 2016-17”). Include in your paragraph an interpretation of the data shown in the Table. What are you trying to show your reader with these data? You should include sentences that provide specific data points from the table as well as summary statements, such as, “Table 2 makes clear that our school has among the highest math test scores, but lags behind the district in terms of disparities across student sub-groups.” In total, your assignment will include four paragraphs with three tables.